[-empyre-] Week 2 - Computation and the Nonhuman

Sun Jun 10 07:00:48 EST 2012

Hi Everyone. I'm really excited for this week of discussions and the
amazing guest participants that will be writing and corresponding with me.
I wanted to thank Zach and Micha for initiating this discussion and
everyone for their wonderful contributions last week.

I wanted to start by tackling the first two questions Zach mentioned, on
queer theory and the nonhuman and on the queer history of computation.
Working in media studies I'm acutely aware of the difficulty Zach mentioned
last week in creating intersections between technical / theoretical /
historical media research and much of queer theory, in part because of the
assumed emphasis on embodiment and identity and the leap in arguing for a
queer logic inherent to technical objects and systems. I've always thought
of the issue through the lens of information theory, in which signal and
noise is prized over content and interiority. While in the past power has
functioned systematically through institutions as a way of regulating the
terms through which meaning and identity were shaped, in information
culture meaning becomes evacuated and flattened, and (almost) all signals
are equally compatible within a given network. This is what Alex Galloway
calls the soft control of protocol, and the shift Deleuze identified in his
"Postscript on Societies of Control". It seems to me that this is one of
the reasons for the shift that Michael Warner described in "Queer and
Then?" and why there is a need for the kind of generational shift in the
field of queer theory being spearheaded by Jack and others.

When queerness becomes compatible with technology and society, we must
shift away from compatibility toward the logic of the exception, of the
hack, of the exploit, etc. Micha and others spoke about this last week in
terms of critical art practices and queer new media art, and I think it's a
constant struggle to confront these technical logics and not simply take
them as the tools we are given. Still others have spoken about a resistive
practice of disappearance, of opting out, of invisibility, of a
"whatever-being" that usually amounts to a kind of "hiding in plain sight"
within the network, but of course the ability and desire to make oneself
invisible to (technologically-mediated) power is often a privilege not
everyone can equally appropriate. Nevertheless it is this question of
externalities to given systems, both social and technical that seems
radically queer to me. This includes an examination of the nonhuman
broadly, as well as the application of queer logics to technical, nonhuman
systems (logics of failure, of exception, of multiplicity).

This brings me to the second question, on the queer history of computing
and that foundational queer figure, Alan Turing. While Turing's tragic
biography is known to many, and his work on artificial intelligence has
been used in discussions of queerness, identity, and gender in the past,
what I find most interesting and radically queer is his early work on
computability and its inverse, uncomputability. If we understand
computation as both the technical and cultural logic that structures new
media, queer new media would seem to lie in those practices that exist
outside of or in contradiction to this seemingly universal logic, in those
objects which are uncomputable. "Super-Turing Machines", they're sometimes
called. None exist, because they often function under the assumption that
impossible or paradoxical calculations can be made, such as the Zeno
Machine, which allows for a countably infinite number of algorithmic steps
to be performed in finite time (and named after the philosopher Zeno of
Elea, *eromenos* of Parmenides). I'm not suggesting that this is the
forefront of a queer new media studies, but I find an investigation of
these limit points fascinating and useful.

The biggest challenge to me is: How we might investigate that which is
external to the technical and cultural logic of new media while remaining
critically engaged with it? What are the limit points of an application of
these queer logics? If failure is a queer mode for investigating new media
(for example the failure of technical objects, or of their ability to
comply with the teleological progress narrative of technological
development), how do we negotiate the limit point of that failure, that a
fully failed and broken machine ceases to be a *productive* object for
investigation, save perhaps in the Heideggerian sense of being
present-at-hand. Indeed there may be room here to analyze the queer
nonhuman as a form of broken-tool-being, although I will leave that
discussion to Michael for the time being.

Just some thoughts to get things started. I'm really looking forward to
hearing from you all!

Jacob Gaboury
- - -
Doctoral Candidate, New York University
Media, Culture, and Communication
- - -
Staff Writer, Rhizome.org
New Museum for Contemporary Art
- - -
http://www.jacobgaboury.com/

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 1:43 PM, micha cárdenas <mmcarden at usc.edu> wrote:

> p.s. Jacob Gaboury and Pinar Yoldas contributed to the intro statement for
> this week...
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Zach Blas <zachblas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all, Micha and I would like to thank Amanda Philips and Margaret
>> Rhee for kicking us off this month. For week 2, we're turning
>> specifically to computation and the nonhuman.
>>
>> Michael Warner’s recent article “Queer and Then?” in The Chronicle of
>> Higher Education considers the end of queer theory alongside the
>> termination of Duke University’s Series Q. While the article assumes a
>> direct link between the end of queer theory and the body of work
>> published in the series, the journal simultaneously gestured to
>> another future for queer theory. The same day that Warner’s piece was
>> published a review entitled “Queer 2.0” applauded Jack Halberstam’s
>> 2011 The Queer Art of Failure for representing “a second generation of
>> queer theory” and its use of low theory and unusual archives. In the
>> earliest academic writing on queer theory, Teresa deLauretis described
>> the field as a “discursive horizon” and Annamarie Jagose described it
>> as an “a non-identity--or even anti-identity--politics”. Yet, in their
>> essays, there is still little consideration of the transgender, the
>> transnational or the transistor.
>>
>> The moniker of Queer 2.0 is useful not only because Micha and I are
>> invested in alternative methodologies that, like Halberstam, move
>> beyond high theory, but also because the phrase highlights and
>> emphasizes the technological and its inseparability from queerness.
>> Today, to think queerness requires that the human and nonhuman be
>> thought together, and that the human be de-centered as the primary
>> locus of/for queerness. Queerness must be engaged in all its
>> distributed materialities, human and beyond. This queerness constructs
>> an alternative genealogy that extends to cyberfeminism, media theory,
>> hacktivism, computer science, animal studies, and neuroscience. This
>> turn also extends beyond Western narratives of technological progress,
>> success, and development, and looks to a resistive repurposing of the
>> failed objects and techniques that circulate in a global context. New
>> horizons for queer theory extend beyond its original United States
>> centric framing, emerging out of transnational considerations and
>> experiences of queer immigrants, including second generation
>> immigrants.
>>
>> This week, we're looking forward to learning more about queer
>> relations and experiences with computation and the nonhuman.
>>
>> Guests this week are:
>>
>> Jacob Gaboury (US) is a doctoral candidate in the department of Media,
>> Culture and Communication at New York University and a staff writer
>> for the art and technology organization Rhizome at the New Museum of
>> Contemporary Art. His work is concerned with media history, art and
>> technology and queer technologies, and he is currently finishing A
>> Queer History of Computing, to be published this summer through
>> Rhizome in partnership with Amazon.com. His dissertation project is
>> titled Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics, and deals
>> with the early history of computer graphics and their role in the
>> shift toward object oriented systems and design.
>>
>> Jack Halberstam (US) is Professor of English, American Studies and
>> Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.
>> Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture
>> with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows:
>> Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of
>> popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it
>> stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998
>> book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about
>> non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon
>> hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s last book, In a Queer Time and Place:
>> Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized
>> queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural
>> scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes
>> several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender
>> ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano
>> of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira
>> Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam
>> regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture
>> and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just published a
>> book titled The Queer Art of Failure in August 2011 from Duke
>> University Press and has another book coming out next year from Beacon
>> Press titled Gaga Feminism. ***Jack will jump into discussion toward
>> the end of the week.***
>>
>> Homay King (US) is Associate Professor in the Department of History of
>> Art and Director of the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College.
>> She is the author of Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the
>> Enigmatic Signifier (Duke UP, 2010). Her essays on film and
>> contemporary art have appeared in Afterall, Camera Obscura, Discourse,
>> Film Quarterly, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She is a
>> member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective. Her current project
>> is book about the virtual.
>>
>> Michael O’Rourke (Ireland) teaches in the Department of Psychotherapy
>> at Independent Colleges Dublin, Ireland and he has published
>> extensively on the intersections between queer theory and continental
>> philosophy. He is currently writing a book on object oriented ontology
>> and speculative realism. Some of his many publications can be found
>> here: http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke
>>
>> Welcome!
>>
>>
>> --
>> zach blas
>> artist & phd candidate
>> literature, information science + information studies, visual studies
>> duke university
>> www.zachblas.info
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
>
> --
> micha cárdenas
> PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
> Provost Fellow, University of Southern California
>
> New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research
>
> MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
>
> Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
> http://amzn.to/x8iJcY
>
> blog: http://transreal.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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